Could cosmic rays be blame for unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles and crashes? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the possibility, which was raised by an industry tipster. (Source: SuperChevy.com)

Could outer space be endangering Toyota's drivers?

Whether
individual reports of runaway
Priuses are true or
not, the sheer number of complaints and accidents would indicate
that many vehicles in Toyota's lineup may have deep underlying
issues. These issues are exacerbated by the fact that many American
drivers are unaware of all the means at their disposal to stop their
vehicles.

The feds are now examining a rather wild theory --
that cosmic
radiation may be causing some of Toyota's electrical
issues. The feds received an anonymous tip from an industry
source that Toyota's microprocessors, memory chips and software may
be more sensitive to cosmic rays than its competitors, causing
increased incidences of malfunctions. Such problems are
commonplace with airplanes or spaceships, raising the need for
extremely robust electronic designs.

Sung Chung, who runs a
California testing firm, says he believes the tipster may be
correct. He states, "I think it could be a real issue with
Toyota. [But] nobody wants to come out and say we have issues
and we need to test."

Electrical interference could help
to explain the unintended
acceleration afflicting 13 models across Toyota's lineup, or
about 5.6 million vehicles in total. While software and
hardware can compensate, to an extent for cosmic interference, cosmic
rays can potentially cause the kind of unrepeatable "single
event upsets" that could add up to many of the 3,000 complaints
against Toyota received by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration since 2000.

William Price, who worked at a jet
propulsion laboratory studying extraterrestrial electromagnetic
interference (EMI) for 20 years, comments, "[It] occurs
virtually anywhere. It doesn't happen in a certain locale like
you would expect in an electromagnetic problem from a radio tower or
something else."

A Toyota spokesperson in a brief
comment to Freep.com said
that Toyota's protections against extraterrestrial EMI were "robust
against this type of interference" and that its vehicles
featured "absolute reliability".

Toyota may not be
the only one susceptible to cosmic EMI, though. Other
manufacturers likely would have similar occurrences even in more
reliable designs, albeit less frequently.

Cosmic EMI may turn
out to be of little concern, or it may turn out to be a major problem
with the increased use of in car electronics. The auto industry
used to use mechanical links, but now uses electrical throttle
controls to save weight and space, and make other technologies
possible, such as stability control. Those benefits could come
at a cost, though.

Update:

There's a lot of confusion about what "cosmic interference" or "cosmic EMI" is. "Cosmic interference" or "cosmic radiation" can mean one of two things: First, disruption due to cosmic rays, which are primarily composed of protons (hydrogen ions), helium nuclei (alpha particles), and high energy electrons. Secondly, cosmic bodies like the sun can transmit self-propagating electromagnetic waves through the vacuum. These waves can be referred to as "cosmic EMI". Cosmic particles can also cause damage, but aren't referred to as EMI. This article is referring to both cosmic rays and cosmic electromagnetic radiation.

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